New York Times: Daphne Koller, a researcher at Stanford whose work has led to advances in artificial intelligence, sees the world as a web of probabilities.

A mathematical theoretician, she has made contributions in areas like robotics and biology. Her biggest accomplishment — and at age 39, she is expected to make more — is creating a set of computational tools for artificial intelligence that can be used by scientists and engineers to do things like predict traffic jams, improve machine vision and understand the way cancer spreads.